High Expectations

To

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

with gratitude for his heart for evangelism and missions

and vision to create

The Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Church Growth

and always to

Jo

a gift from God

of encouragement, joy, and love

Contents

List of Exhibits

Acknowledgments

Introduction  Churches That Reach Them and Keep Them

Chapter 1      How They Close the Back Door

Chapter 2      Above All: Sunday School and the Back Door

Chapter 3      What Must I Do to Join This Church?

Chapter 4      The Pastor and the High-Expectation Church

Chapter 5      How Prospects Are Treated and Evangelized

Chapter 6      Expectations Clarified: The New Member Class

Chapter 7      After They Join

Chapter 8      Vision, Mission, and High Expectations

Chapter 9      Obstacles to Assimilation

Chapter 10     Lessons from the High-Expectation Church

Appendix A   Participating Churches

Appendix B   Survey Instrument

Notes

List of Exhibits

Acknowledgments

My name appears on the cover as the author of this book. For the uninitiated, that means that the words you read are my own. I wrote the manuscript that became a book.

This book, however, is far from a solo effort. Indeed, it would not be a reality without the concerted efforts of a great team.

Sherrie Drake typed the entire manuscript. She made numerous corrections (of my mistakes!). She met tension-filled deadlines with grace and dignity. And she put up with my overdrive personality that wants everything done yesterday, even when I fail to get things done until tomorrow. This book indeed is as much Sherrie's as it is mine.

Debbie Ethridge is our graphic artist in residence. The plethora of charts, graphs, and illustrations are all her handiwork. Debbie somehow was able to have a baby in the midst of her work.

Grady Sutton, my research assistant, did an unbelievable amount of research work for this project. Grady has an uncanny sense for detail as well as great organizational skills. When I ask him to just do it, I know the work will be extraordinary.

Chuck Lawless is one of the rising stars in the world of evangelism and church growth. Chuck devised the survey that was the foundation for this research. He also gathered the data and began the initial interpretation. This book has Chuck's fingerprints all over it.

Numerous other professors and doctoral students should also be credited for this work. This team from Southern Seminary is an extraordinary group. Thank you, guys. You make me proud to be at Southern, and you make work a joy.

My wonderful family has once again shown their love and patience in enduring yet another book. God has blessed me with the greatest sons on earth. Thank you Sam, Art, and Jess. What did I ever do to deserve such precious gifts as you three boys?

Then the heart of the Rainer family, my wife Jo, has demonstrated again her grace and love to me. When I grow weary with the research, travels, and writing, I find the greatest happiness in knowing I can come home to a wife of such beauty and joy. Thank you, Jo. I will never say it enough: I love you.

One final word. This project was delayed because of the sudden and unexpected death of my mother, Nan Rainer. God blessed me with a mom of incomparable love for the first forty-two years of my life. I guess it is expected that grown children grieve publicly only a short while when their parents die. So I have maintained a front of composure, but deep inside I have shed a million tears.

I know you are in heaven, Mom. I could not be more certain of your salvation in Christ. But my theology is such that I am unsure if you can read these words or see the depth of my grief. Perchance you are able to know what I have written, please hear the words of a son who hurts deeply.

One day I will see you again. In the scope of eternity, the time will be short. But from my earthly perspective, the days are longer and sadder than I ever imagined. Thanks, Mom, for a life of love. I will see you soon.

Thom Rainer

Louisville, Kentucky

Easter Sunday, 1998

(The promise of the resurrection)

INTRODUCTION

Churches That Reach Them

and Keep Them

If I could name the most pressing issue in our church, the pastor told me, it would be the issue of losing members through inactivity or transferrng to another church. An associate pastor in the Midwest had a similar concern: We have added 411 members in four years. That's a pretty impressive number. But his joy was obviously tempered by another issue. But even with over 400 additions, our attendance has only increased by 75 in those four years. Something's wrong!

You would think that my ministry would be the ideal situation. I have been at the church for eleven years. The people love me. And I can't complain about my salary. The pastor's demeanor told me that something in his church was certainly less than ideal. He continued: You know, even though we are one of the leading churches in the state in baptisms, the real story isn't being told. We are losing people almost as fast as we gain them. Our back door is wide open!

The Problem of the Open Back Door

For as long as I have been in ministry, I have heard church leaders talk about back door problems. While the front door refers to new members or gains in attendance, the back door typically means loss of members or decreases in attendance. I have spoken with leaders of numerous denominations and independent churches, and the problem seems to be alarmingly common in American churches. People are leaving our churches by the thousands each day, and others are quietly becoming less and less active.

Two years ago I led a research team to study churches that were reaching people for Christ. The results, reported in my book Effective Evangelistic Churches,¹ demonstrated that these churches were focusing on several basic issues in order to evangelize lost persons. The study also indicated that some of the more common approaches used to reach people for Christ were largely ineffective.

The breadth of that first study may have set it apart from other research on evangelistic churches. In the midst of that comprehensive project, our research team quickly saw that another project of equal detail would be needed. Though these churches were adding many members through conversion growth, many were also experiencing an exodus of members. And even if a particular church was not seeing large losses of membership, it may not have seen attendance gains that would have been proportionate to the number of people added to the church. Like the church mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the total number of new members did not translate into similar gains in attendance.

Our research team desired to receive even more detail than we did in our first study. Under the leadership of Dr. Chuck Lawless, a research instrument was devised that included nearly thirty pages of questions and data input. Despite the incredible number of hours each church had to put into the instrument, we were delighted that nearly three hundred churches participated in this study. As a consequence, you the reader are about to discover insights from churches in what is perhaps the most comprehensive study of its kind.

A Look at Two Churches

Before we examine some of the more technical data in this study, let us look at two of the churches that provided us some of the insights for this book. Their stories give us the spirit that will be evident in so many of the churches and their leaders whom you will meet.

Friendship Baptist Church

Litchfield, Connecticut

We travel first to the northeastern United States to the small town of Litchfield, Connecticut. Darril Deaton has been the pastor of Friendship Baptist Church for five years. The church has experienced growth from under 90 in attendance to over 200 in one year's time. More importantly, 99 people have been baptized in just two years, and many more people have accepted Christ through a number of mission activities.

Friendship is a church that is not only reaching people, it is keeping them as well. Three-fourths of those added to the church in recent years are still active in the church today. This healthy assimilation rate is even more remarkable in light of the fact that 90 percent of the new Christians had no previous relationship with the church.

When Pastor Deaton was asked about the key to the closing of the back door, his response was straightforward: The pastor is the main disciplemaker by example; I encourage every area of the church ministry, at every age level, to be disciple-making. I also lead several groups where I train others to make disciples.

This assimilation and discipling by example is key to the good results experienced by Friendship. But such an example by the pastor requires a clear communication of that vision to the membership. For Pastor Deaton, the communication comes through several means, but the primary communication vehicle is the sermon. And like nine out of ten of the pastors in this study, preaching was rated as one of the most exciting aspects of their ministries. A similar number of the pastors declared committee meetings to be the least exciting aspect of their ministry. These men had found ways to spend time in those ministries that make the most difference in the lives of people.

Friendship Baptist Church is a high-expectation church. Some of the expectations placed upon prospective members include the following:

attendance in a new member orientation class,

commitment to attend a discipling program,

commitment to tithe to the church,

regular attendance in worship services,

regular attendance in Sunday School classes, and

commitment to doctrinal guidelines.

The issue of expectations was heard clearly in the comments made by the pastor: New members and new believers are discipled on their level and nurtured through the early stages of discipleship. Soon they begin choosing for themselves places of service, areas of involvement, and they become regular in worship and ministry-related activities. The new members and new believers know that their acceptance into the church is accompanied by clearly established expectations.

Another factor that enhances the successful assimilation taking place at Friendship Baptist is a vision statement that most of the church members understand and own for themselves. Whereas a mission statement sets forth the common purposes of all churches, a vision statement articulates God's specific plan for a specific church at a specific time. Listen to the specific vision for Friendship:

We will confront every person in Northwest Connecticut with the gospel of Christ in order to expand the kingdom, and we will locate specific people and places where Christ would have us establish ministries and make disciples.

Where do most prospective and new members hear the vision and learn about expectations? In the case of Friendship Baptist, a great level of importance is given to the new member orientation class. Like so many churches in this study, this class is critical in establishing the expectations for membership. The topics covered in Friendship's new member class are comprehensive:

doctrine of the church,

church government and polity,

membership requirements,

policies for disciplining and excluding members,

expectations of members after joining,

witness and evangelism training,

training in spiritual disciplines,

church covenant,

inventory of spiritual gifts,

explanation of the church's mission and vision,

church staff and leadership,

ministry and service opportunities in the church,

expectations of tithing and further giving,

support of missions through the Cooperative Program,

understanding baptism,

understanding the Lord's Supper,

tour of the church's facilities, and

understanding the concept of spiritual armor.

Despite the incredible level of expectations evident at Friendship Baptist Church, Pastor Deaton is still not satisfied. He told us that we are not as organized as we should be, and we need an up-to-date, streamlined mission statement. Such was the attitude of most of the leaders whose churches are in this study. Their churches are doing very well in retaining members, but the pastors are always looking for ways to improve.

Immanuel Baptist Church

Sallisaw, Oklahama

John Ewart has been the pastor of Immanuel Baptist for over five years. Sallisaw is a small Oklahoma town with a population of under 10,000. The members of the church are relatively young, with 70 percent of the people under age 50. In the past two years of record, the church has added 135 members, half of those by conversion growth. In that same period, the church has